The Sasquatch Mystery

“Please wait for me! I’m the detective in this family!”
    “So I’ve heard,” Cap said admiringly. He picked up a stack of enameled mugs and followed Trixie’s example. “There, that should do it.” Trixie giggled. “Miss Trask won’t give us A for effort. Let’s go!”
    With pails swinging, Cap and Trixie set off down a trail that one day’s use had marked from campground to creek.
    “The earth’s surface is fragile,” Cap said. “By the time we’ve left here, we’ll have changed the whole growth schedule of all the plants we’re walking on.”
    Anxiously Trixie looked at the earth. She tried to put her boot soles on the bare earth, not on the delicate-looking white goatsbeard and the shiny-leafed pipsissewa.
    “Don’t walk on the bare spots,” Cap warned. “That’s where we may find a print.”
    “You’re hard to please,” Trixie commented, following him downstream in a soundless, elbow-pumping lope.
    A couple of hundred yards from the fire pit, ants worked on tiny melon scraps that larger animals had missed.
    Cap read tracks as if scanning the pages of a book. “A skunk. Two porkies.”
    “How do you know there were two porcupines?” Trixie asked. “One could have moved around a lot.”
    “Track sizes,” Cap explained. “Probably mother and young.” He whistled. “What have we here?”
    Trixie stood beside Cap and stared down at a duplicate of the enormous track left by the fire pit;
    “It 1-likes people food,” Trixie gulped.
    “Now I wish we had buried those rinds,” said Cap.
    Trixie tried to rub down chill bumps of apprehension. “I always feel my skin prickle when I run across something I don’t understand,” she confessed.
    “Me, too. But we have a big problem now— how to avoid a panic.”
    “Gleeps, you’re right,” said Trixie. “How shall we start?”
    “With breakfast under our belts,” Cap said firmly.
    Minutes later, Trixie and Cap had joined the others and were wolfing down juicy pink ham and great dollops of scrambled eggs and fried cornmeal mush. It wasn’t long before the conversation turned to the sasquatch.
    “Cap, did you really see him?” asked Brian. “Or did you just—”
    “Saw him,” Cap said firmly. “Smelled him. Heard him.”
    “You forgot tasted.” Trixie wrinkled her nose at the memory of the rank, oily odor.
    “Haven’t you been reading about the sasquatch sightings?” Knut asked Brian.
    “Not much,” Brian admitted.
    Knut frowned. “You can think the beast is a myth if you like, but Cap and Trix didn’t model a footprint to give us a thrill. Nor have dozens of other citizens. Our own state university has put out a scientific pamphlet of facts and theories related to the sasquatch. For example, a crippled one has been tracked in the vicinity of Spokane, Washington. Now, as the crow flies, that’s no more than seventy-five miles from here. Of course, this fellow can’t fly, but it has unusually long, strong legs. It could cover a lot of miles in a short time if it had to.”
    “Wasn’t there a bogus sighting in California?” asked Mart.
    “More than one,” Cap agreed. “Publicity hounds always get into the act.”
    “Our Northwest anthropologists are asking for all the information they can get,” Knut went on. “The problem is, they don’t know what to do with the information they already have. People have heard monster stories all their lives. Even if they make some kind of contact with the sasquatch, they’re embarrassed to come forward and say so. Who wants to be called a crackpot?”
    “Well, what are the facts?” asked Miss Trask. “Anthropologists are tabulating the locations and dates of footprints and fur tufts that are found,” said Knut. “They’re interviewing people who’ve made sightings. Oregon’s taken the first step in trying to protect the species. They’ve passed a law that forbids shooting the sasquatch. They’re hoping to capture a live animal, although any body, alive or dead, would be final proof of existence.”
    “What does it eat?” Di asked anxiously. “Some say vegetable matter,” Cap answered, “but it’ll take anything it can get. I’m prepared to state that it likes melon.”
    Miss Trask looked thoughtful. “I can’t say I’m fully convinced that the creature exists. In any case, Diana, I’m sure that Knut and Cap will do a fine job of looking out for us.”
    An uncomfortable silence developed. Then Cap said, “My ears seldom lie, and I’ve heard